Word: streets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Bezos' job at D.E. Shaw, an unusual firm that prides itself on hiring some of the smartest people in the world and then figuring out what kind of work they might profitably do. David Shaw, a former professor of computer science at Columbia University, had been wooed to Wall Street by Morgan Stanley, where he specialized in the arcane field of quantitative analysis--using computers to spot trends in the market. He formed his own company in 1988, initially to carry on that kind of work, but with so much brainpower around the office, it seemed a shame to waste...
...over the next few years. During the past two weeks, with holiday sales booming, Amazon's stock price has soared to $94. The stock has split three times. Sales are expected to crest $1 billion this year. "We firmly believe," says Salomon Smith Barney's Holly Becker, "that Wall Street will look back on these growing pains and realize management's foresight in developing one of the smartest strategies in business history...
...Amazon landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The story did two things: it introduced Amazon to a whole new stream of customers, and it caught the attention of rivals like Barnes & Noble and Borders Group, which hadn't yet moved online. Barnesandnoble.com would appear a year later--just before Amazon's initial public offering, which went off at a modest $18 a share. Never mind that the celebrated venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was its biggest institutional investor before the IPO. Wall Streeters were afraid of the threat posed by the giant Barnes & Noble...
That even goes for where you sit. Amazon offices are scattered across Seattle: the flagship Art Deco Pacific Medical Center, the Pike Street skyscraper, the original Columbia building and so on. Stunning mountain-flanked views of Lake Washington and Puget Sound are the only luxury the spartan corporate aesthetic allows. Employees are crammed two to a bare-walled office and work at Bezos-designed desks made of old doors with legs stuck on them (design director Helen Owen bets me lunch that she will still have a door-desk in five years, even if Amazon flourishes...
Attacking from the Internet is Amazon.com the Web superstore that began selling toys this summer and plans to do to eToys what it did to CDnow in the online music business--knock it out of the top spot. Attacking from the street as well as from cyberspace are the classic "bricks-and-mortar" retailers Toys "R" Us and KB Toys, which were written off as Net players after the last holiday season but this year have developed online offshoots...